The pigeon-sized dinosaur called Epidexipteryx lived around 168-152 million years ago in the Middle to Late Jurassic. It lived before the oldest known bird and had long tail feathers but no flight feathers seen in other bird-like dinosaurs.

Uncovering the new species

Fucheng Zhang and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, described the new species. The fossil was uncovered from the Daohugou beds, in Nincheng County, Inner Mongolia.

Epidexipteryx, meaning ‘display wing/feather’, belongs to a group, or clade of bird-like dinosaurs called Avialae. It is a distantly related to the oldest known bird Archaeopteryx that lived about 147 million years ago.

Other feathered-dinosaurs

There have been many other feathered dinosaurs found in China, especially at the famous fossil site in Laioning Province which is Early Cretaceous in age.

‘These finds have answered many questions about the evolutionary transition from small meat-eating dinosaurs to birds,’ says Dr Milner.

Dr Milner concludes, ‘Epidexipteryx provides fascinating evidence of evolutionary experiments with feathersthat were going on before small dinosaurs finally took to the air and became birds.’